VANCOUVER – In almost every police investigation, officers search for a motive, the reason or reasons behind a suspect’s actions.
Throughout his nearly 30-year career, Eric R. Hallam was no different.
Whether he was employed as a rookie constable by the British Columbia Provincial Police in 1947, or deputy chief by the West Vancouver Police Department in the early 1970s, Hallam was frequently searching for motive.
He knows why, as a young provincial police officer, he was stabbed in the heart and lung in June 1950 and almost died. The suspect was suffering from mental illness, he said.
But to this day, the 85-year-old Hallam remains stumped by a motive that still eludes many of his fellow BCPP veterans: why did the provincial government decide to disband the force on Aug. 15, 1950 and contract police services to the RCMP?
“We never did find out,” he said. “We have our ideas and suspicions, but I’m not going to tell you what they were.”
The B.C. government has been looking back to the future in recent weeks after the federal government threatened B.C. and several other Canadian provinces with an ultimatum: sign a 20-year-contract for RCMP services by the end of November or lose the Mounties in 2014.
B.C. Solicitor General Shirley Bond has said the province is now reconsidering the financial implications of re-establishing a provincial alternative.
By the 1850s, according to the BCPP Veterans Association website, then governor James Douglas had been pleading with British officials for adequate policing for the new colony.
British officials finally heeded his requests, and in 1858, the force’s predecessor was born in Fort Langley, B.C.
By 1938, the BCPP had built itself into the “the most highly modernized law-enforcement organization in North America” and was recognized continent-wide, Hallam wrote in the preface to “Why? The Last Years of the British Columbia Provincial Police,” a book penned by the late Donald Brown and published in 2000.
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Hallam wrote the force used motorized vessels to scour the province’s coast and was the first police force to buy an aircraft for patrol purposes.
By 1950, the force had 530 members, 482 of whom transferred to the Mounties after the provincial force was disbanded, he added.
Brown, also a BCPP veteran who later joined the RCMP, concluded the motivation for then B.C. attorney general Gordon Wismer to disband the force in favour of the Mounties had to be political.
The provincial force was efficient and the savings from the switchover weren’t huge, he wrote.
Worries over a unionized force were “ridiculous,” he wrote, because a majority of members opposed unions.
“There was never a published reason as to why,” he wrote. “There was a hidden agenda covered by the disclosure that the province would save considerable monies if the RCMP took over policing of British Columbia.”
Brown said the decision to disband was made behind closed doors with the federal government and with no input from the province’s municipalities, villages and hamlets which had entered into contracts for police services.
The deal wasn’t popular with them, nor with many members of the public.
Newspaper headlines of the day screamed “Breach of Faith in Police Deal,” “Eleven Former B.C. Police Quit Rather Than Serve for RCMP,” and “B.C.’s Police Bitter.”
Phil Jamieson was a technical advisor during a provincial Commission of Inquiry into Policing in British Columbia in the 1990s and was a municipal police officer of some 30 years. He said he believes the provincial government was motivated by economic and security issues.
Jamieson said for the first five years of the RCMP contract, B.C.’s attorney general controlled the RCMP and the federal government agreed to subsidize the contract by 50 per cent.
But that subsidy fell to 10 per cent in the last RCMP contract and Ottawa now controls the force.
Jamieson also said there was a fear of communism in the early 1950s and the RCMP was responsible for spying, a role now filled by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.
He dismissed any suggestions the force was disbanded due to inefficiency or corruption.
“If they were corrupt, why would the RCMP have taken well over 90 per cent of them into the RCMP?” asked Jamieson.
Beside its coastal patrol fleet, the provincial police had its own forensic unit, employed the best pistol shots in the Pacific Northwest, had a precision riding squad similar to the RCMP Musical Ride, established a highway patrol unit and connected the office in Williams Lake with Victoria through short-wave radio, he said.
Jamieson said the force even had its own magazine, the “Shoulder Strap,” which was sold on newsstands and kept the public informed about policing issues around the province.
“They were very, very well respected,” he said.
Whatever the motivation, the changeover happened on Aug. 15, 1950 and took many BCPP officers by surprise, said Hallam.
“There were rumours but that was all, and nobody was really for sure,” he said.
While he’s proud of his service with the BCPP, Hallam said he’s skeptical about B.C.’s ability to fund its own force if talks over the current RCMP contract go nowhere with the federal government.
He questioned where B.C. would get the money to pay for the force, even if Ottawa sells the RCMP’s equipment at “fire sale” prices.
Hallam also questioned where the RCMP would dump the 6,000 officers serving in B.C., and where B.C. would find 6,000 officers.
“You’re going to wind up working for the same members whether you like ’em or dislike ’em in a different uniform. That’s the only way they can do it.”
Hallam offered a solution.
Keep the Mounties in B.C., give Victoria more control over the force and regionalize police services between Vancouver, Horseshoe Bay, Richmond and Hope.
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